Today was just a waiting day.  Waiting for our documents to be translated and filed with the US INS.  That should be done today and filed with the INS tomorrow morning.  That means a long, three-day weekend because of Columbus day.  Hopefully we can get an INS interview early next week and get up to Hanoi mid-late next week.  Then … home!  We are having a fine time here, but we miss all the kids (Hi Zach, Jake, Nick, Brit, Max, and Luke) and are pretty much done with the Vietnamese thing.  Nice place to visit … don’t want to stay too long!

For those of you concerned about my bonding with Mia, look at the pictures below.  It isn’t perfect, but she is tolerating me a lot more.  In fact, the two of us played on the bed for over a 1/2-hour this morning with Kelly out of the room.  I think she only cried once or twice.

Without a lot of stuff on our agenda, we went shopping this morning (AGAIN!) and then went for a walk this afternoon.  There are a lot of street vendors.  We haven’t had enough guts to actually TRY them yet, but I was close today.  I passed a lady who was frying something and I figured anything fried has GOT to be good, doesn’t it??

We went to the Reunification Palace for a tour while we were out.  It was the former Presidential Palace when South Vietnam was an independent state.  Then, in April 1974, the North advanced into HCMC and took the palace.  This was the beginning of the unification of North and South Vietnam.

Here is Kelly and Mia in front of the palace:

It really was very pretty … both on the outside and the inside.  They had various rooms for the president and vice president to meet people:

And, the view from the third floor really does show off how pretty this city is in many areas:

We went down into the basement where they kept all the combat areas.  Mia enjoyed riding in the carrier with Kelly.

I posted a bunch of other HCMC city pictures in the photo section if you would like to see them.  We were going to the zoo today, but didn’t make it!  Maybe tomorrow.

Cameron